Arboretum, kite

The weather was gorgeous in DC today...sunny and in the 60s, though quite windy. It's the National Cherry Blossom Festival this weekend, and as I saw last year, hordes of people come into the city to see them.

So instead, I rode to the National Arboretum, which is lovely, and even has a number of flowering trees, but is comparatively unknown and out of the way. There were more people there than I've ever seen, but it's big enough that it didn't feel claustrophobic. In any case, there was still enough elbow room for me to find an empty clearing to eat my Subway sandwich in solitude.

Since it was windy, I brought along my kite-in-a-bag. I flew it by the National Capitol Columns.

A few minutes after I snapped this picture, the string snapped, and the kite flew away and became well-entangled near the top of a tree at the edge of the field. Thus, I managed to both lose my kite and leave a big, colorful piece of litter in a high-visibility location...sigh.

Still a pleasant afternoon out, though. A few more cell phone pictures are at Flickr.